


when violence causes silence we must be mistaken (in your head, in your head)

by gay_writes_with_mac



Series: Prodigal Son [5]
Category: Prodigal Son (TV 2019)
Genre: Dani Powell Whump, Drug Abuse, Gen, Good Parent Gil Arroyo, Origin Story of Major Crimes, Protective Gil Arroyo, drug overdose, mac? writing gil doing something other than cockblocking brightwell? it's more likely than you think, minus Bright
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-01
Updated: 2021-02-01
Packaged: 2021-03-12 18:13:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,340
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29139837
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gay_writes_with_mac/pseuds/gay_writes_with_mac
Summary: Head of Narcotics Lieutenant Gil Arroyo has a vacancy to fill, and Dani Powell presents an interesting candidate. But can she take the pressure?
Relationships: Gil Arroyo & Dani Powell, Gil Arroyo & JT Tarmel
Series: Prodigal Son [5]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2019443
Comments: 2
Kudos: 8





	when violence causes silence we must be mistaken (in your head, in your head)

3:30 a.m. Eyes burning, Gil turns another page over in the list of new officers. One retirement and one funeral later, he’s got two vacancies to fill on his team in Narcotics. He’s already settled on one - a kid from Homicide who’s looking to do a few more months in another division before trying for the FBI. Gil likes him; he keeps his head down, does the job, and can be counted on to show up. He’ll make a fine temporary bandage for the open wound left behind by Officer Roberts’ death.  
The other isn’t proving to be so easy.  
Officer Tandy had handpicked her own replacement - then he’d taken an offer to transfer to Jersey instead. Leaving Gil with a file as thick as his fist full of possible new officers chomping at the bit for the job.  
He turns the page again and this time - for the first time in about ten pages now - he hesitates. _Daniela Powell, 19. _She’s young, especially to be considered for such a high-level position. But looking at her headshot, Gil sees why. There’s something bright burning in those fierce brown eyes - something passionate, something unstoppable. Anything trying to stop Daniela Powell had better get the hell out of her way.  
He calls her in the next day for an interview. She shakes his hand with a firm grip and doesn’t sit down until he nods to the chair. Her jaw is set, her eyes are fiery, and as soon as their eyes lock Gil sees that she’s white-knuckled and bracing for a fight.  
“Daniela,” he says, looking up from her open file on the desk. That’s as far as he gets before she stops him, her voice much more collected than he thought it’d be for someone so tensed-up and angry.  
“Dani,” she says, and she pushes back one of her wild black curls from her face, a reflexive motion. They must fall in her eyes often. “No one calls me Daniela.”  
“No one?” Gil arches an eyebrow, leaning his elbows on the desktop.  
And it’s with a tilted-up chin and hardly a trace of sorrow in her voice that she proudly informs him, “Not anymore. I’m Dani now.”  
Fifteen minutes later he gives her the job. It does nothing to douse the fire in those eyes but a real smile lights up her face for a fraction of a second and Gil swears to God she’s trying not to skip when she leaves his office.__

* * *

____

____

She’s been in the job barely a month when she comes back to him and sits back down in that weathered old chair - after waiting for his nod. Her chin is tilted up and she’s got that look on her face - the determined one, the one that means she’s after something and she’s not stopping until she’s got it.  
“I want the undercover job,” she says with no preamble. Her eyes hold his and they’re burning even brighter than usual.  
“Jason’s getting the undercover job,” Gil responds, setting down the case file he was flipping through. Another string of overdoses. That’s what triggered this undercover operation in the first place. “He’s got it covered.”  
“No, he doesn’t.”  
The derisiveness in her tone is so obvious - Dani, never play poker - that it well and truly nets up Gil’s attention. “Why do you say that?” he asks, steepling his fingers on the desktop.  
“Come on, Lieutenant Arroyo.” Dani shakes her head. “He thinks mayonnaise is spicy.”  
The chuckle that comes out by accident is half-incredulous, half-amused, and Gil has to work hard for a moment to compose himself. “Is that so?”  
“They’ll make him in a minute. Lieutenant, he looks like a cop.”  
“And you think you can do better?”  
“Yeah.” Dani purses her lips - she really doesn’t want to follow up. But she’s not getting a job like this, not without explaining why she needs it. “That kind of place - that’s where I’m from. Where everyone thinks I’m supposed to be. I could fit in there.”  
“You sound like you have a plan,” Gil says, already knowing she does. She wouldn’t have come to him without one.  
Dani nods. “Put me in as one of his girls. They’re a dime a dozen, there’s always new ones coming in, and their number one job is to fade into the background. To be faceless. It’s the perfect cover.”  
Gil raises an eyebrow. Looks her up and down. “And you’re certain that you can handle it? That you can keep that temper of yours in check?”  
He’s sure she’s going to get angry. Sure that she’s going to prove him right, to buck at that, to let her anger get the jump on her and ruin her own chances. But maybe it’s a sign that he’s teaching her well, because she takes a deep, even breath, and the corner of her mouth barely twitches.  
“I know how to hold my tongue, Lieutenant Arroyo,” she says evenly, only fanning that fire burning behind her eyes. “I held it for nineteen years. I managed because I needed to to survive. I can do it again.”  
The next day Gil processes the paperwork to send Dani Powell undercover as a narcotics agent.

* * *

And that’s the last he sees of her for days, weeks, months. He supposes that’s a good thing. For the carefully crafted personality they built for her to come to life, Dani had to die for a little while, and the dead can’t be found speaking.  
Until one late night at his desk when he’s looking at a file and the door flies open. It’s not one of his own but one of the beat cops - but Gil knows him, likes him. Officer Tarmel isn’t one for much chit-chat, but he shows up, he does the job, and he’s fighting hard for a job inside the precinct. Gil considered him for the Narcotics job and he’s still looking out for a position that’ll fit JT. He’s sure it’s coming up one of these days.  
“JT.” He looks up - the younger man’s eyes are wide and frantic, as if a ghost just passed through him. “What happened? What’s wrong?”  
“I was out on patrol - tripped over something-” JT’s out of breath from running and he struggles to get through the words. “It’s Powell,” he says finally, through big, heaving gasps for air. “It’s Powell.”  
Gil’s out of his chair before he’s even fully put the file down.

* * *

She’s grey.  
That’s what he really can’t get out of his head. Her skin gone as grey as old ashes.  
Ashes are born from dying fires. Gil thinks back to that fire burning in her dark eyes. He fights not to mourn her before she’s even gone.  
Because at first it’s certain that she will be gone. She’s hanging on by a thread and her pulse keeps tanking and every time Gil turns his back for ten seconds she’s slipping back into the light.  
So finally he sits at her bedside and finds her hand and squeezes it.  
“Where’s that temper now, huh, Powell?” He asks, and his voice is rough and ragged and hoarse from a combination of barely speaking and occasionally fending off calls from every department in the NYPD. “The kid that came into my office and asked for the Narcotics job would never go out like this. I’m not gonna have this be the end of you, Dani, but that means your ass has gotta quit dying so I can save it. Okay?”  
She doesn’t tank anymore after that.  
But it’s another day before she opens her eyes and when she does Gil almost misses the coma. Because she’s soaked in sweat and she can’t even hang onto a sip of water for more than a few seconds and she’s dizzy and she’s anxious and she’s got stomach pains so bad she’s muffling screams into her pillow and she cries.  
The rest of it he can handle. But Gil once saw Dani get the absolute hell beaten out of her by a suspect twice her size and walk away without a tear in her eyes despite the purpling bruises on her face. So seeing her cry now - more often than she’s not - scares him more than the rest of it put together.  
He stays by her bedside because he finds out fast that no one else in the precinct other than JT wants to come sit with her and there’s no one in her records to call - if she had parents or siblings, she tried hard to wipe them out of her life. Gil looks through her file and finds himself listed as her emergency contact.  
She’s in the middle of another round of crying, hugging a pillow to her stomach and trying to hide her face so he can’t see the tears - he does her the mercy of looking away - when the door to her room comes open and in strides his superior officer. He looks down his nose at Gil coolly - literally, because the hospital chair is tiny and he’s lower than he should be. “This is what I’m paying you for?”  
“I’m still putting my hours in. Cases are being solved.” Gil tilts his chin up - a move he learned from Dani, he realizes later. “She needs someone to be there for her.”  
“Call her parents, then, Arroyo.”  
“No one came.” Gil glances back over at Dani, whose head is still buried in her pillow, and he wonders how much she’s hearing - if she’s hearing anything at all. “There’s no one coming for her.”  
“Not to worry,” his officer says sarcastically. “I won’t be in your hair long, and then you can get back to your mothering. I’m here to collect her gun and her badge.”  
“You will not.” Dani’s badge is in the nightstand drawer and Gil instinctively steps in front of her. “Not until you have cause.”  
He sneers. It’s an ugly look, like a horse drawing back its lips. “You can’t possibly be thinking that she’ll keep her job.”  
“She hasn’t lost it yet,” Gil insists. “Not until she’s awake and present for a fair hearing with someone to defend her.”  
“I suppose you’ll be defending her, then?” He doesn’t wait for an answer. “Your precious officer got hooked on the drugs she was supposed to be getting off the streets and overdosed on the job. She’s not a cop. She’s a junkie. And in case you forgot, she also isn’t your daughter.”  
“She doesn’t have to be my daughter to be a good cop,” Gil says stiffly, but his eyes fall from his commanding officer to Dani, hugging a pillow with her knees drawn up to her chest, rocking back and forth and trying to hide her face. She’s about the right age to be his daughter, if he’d ever had children. “And she is still a cop. And I am going to do everything in my power to keep her job.”

* * *

He doesn’t tell Dani about what happened with his commanding officer. She’s different when she comes out of it, even after she’s left the hospital. Her pin-straight posture is no more, and she can’t bring herself to look Gil in the eye. And whenever he needs her, he starts with the gym. That’s where she always is, plastered in sweat, practicing pullups or doing a hundred situps, building up the toned muscles she lost during her hospital stay. No matter what he tells her, she won’t slow it down.  
Finally, he goes into a meeting with his commanding officer’s commanding officer, Dani’s file tucked under his arm. He went through it, marked up every one of her good qualities, made his rounds pulling favors for letters of recommendation. Anything he could do to help.  
“You really think she’s a good cop?” Captain Santiago says finally, turning the last page.  
“I think she’s got what it takes to be one of the best.” Gil clenches his jaw - as often as he rehearsed it, this part is always the hardest to tell himself in the mirror. “Officer Daniela Powell was too young and too inexperienced to be placed in an undercover position and the blame for her accident falls squarely on my shoulders for signing off on it. If you need to fire someone, but make it me. But if Dani leaves this precinct, I’ll be leaving with her.”  
Santiago stares him down for a moment - God, her eyes can bore holes right through him. “I can’t send her back to Narcotics,” she says finally. “You know that. It’s not a safe environment there for her anymore. She could go back to being a beat cop-”  
“I’ll take it.”  
Santiago raises an eyebrow. “It?”  
“Last month you asked me to start a new division. Major Crimes.” Gil folds his hands under the table to keep them from shaking. “I’ll take it. And the first officer I want on my team is Dani Powell.”  
Santiago nods slowly. “You’d leave behind Narcotics for her?”  
“I would.”  
“Then by all means, go forward with Major Crimes.” Santiago pushes the file back across the table. “I can give you one more officer to begin. Any frontrunners?”  
Chest swelling with pride that overcomes the bittersweetness of leaving behind his beloved job in Narcotics, Gil responds “I’d like to promote Officer JT Tarmel to the Department of Major Crimes.”

* * *

Dani shows up half an hour early to her first day back. She picked out the braids she’d been wearing undercover and soft, bouncy curls flow around her face. She looks younger with a clean face and her hair down. “You didn’t have to do this,” she says hoarsely by means of greeting, nervously twisting her hands. “I didn’t deserve all this.”  
“We’re not here to talk about the past, Dani,” Gil reminds her gently. “When I hired you, you told me you came here to leave that behind. So let it die, and look forward.  
“There’s so much more on the horizon than there is in your wake.”


End file.
